Spice
by xxxPiratePrincessxxx
Summary: After the gray darkness of the war, the sun shines on the day when Draco Malfoy is getting married. AstoriaXDraco, one-shot, please R&R.


He meets Astoria Greengrass twice before they marry, and each time she kissed him, properly, on the mouth.

"So there's no awkwardness," she smiles dazzlingly, and all he can do is nod and grunt and try not to think that it was awkward enough that his mother knew more about her than he did.

They are both nineteen. Her hair is long and dark, straight on the first meeting and curly on the next. Her skin is nut-brown and her black eyes glimmer like sunlit diamonds and she smells of certain spices and expensive coffee. She is the second most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

He is informed that she is half-blood (his father twitches slightly at the word), her parents being an Arabian Desert princess and a powerfully built Slytherin-veined explorer, who nearly breaks Lucius's fingers in the handshake and keeps his long, thick arm in a firm grip around his exceedingly lovely wife throughout both meetings, in an attitude that suggested many had tried to remove her from it.

Surprises unfurl like blossoming flowers in the weeks that pass. It is with her newly-accepted sister Andromeda that Narcissa arranges the venue, but Lucius blasts the roof off the Western Library when he finds that Ted Tonks had timidly entered the main lounge to offer his wishes when arriving to pick his wife up. For the first time after the war, Narcissa cries, and the self-righteous set of Lucius's features fades. After four days Lucius agrees to speak to Ted without using the word 'Mudblood', and after a month the two are swigging Firewhisky in the study and having curt, civil conversations, mostly about the economy and what on earth Minister Shacklebolt will do next about various unimportant things.

Draco spends his days organising Auror paperwork and ordering spicy food up to his room. Often, but not too often, he thinks about the taste of Astoria's mouth. After he knocks a plate of steaming curry over (onto some particularly important 1997 Voodoo Exploitation case notes) in an Astoria-induced distraction he switches to drinking coffee.

Life went on.

The big day arrives, and three black-eyed brothers approach him before the ceremony to half-jokingly threaten creative forms of death if any harm was to come to their sister. The sheer terror that washed over him from the incident is numbed when he thinks of the talking-to Potter would've had from Ginny's five looming, muscled ginger brothers. It is wonderfully bright, the sky pale blue, but the sun heats the underside of his stiff collar and his throat is sticky with sweat when he turns to look at the bride, on the arm of her far taller father.

Astoria's hair is arranged on her head in dark silky ringlets. She is fetching in flowing white silk and traditional emerald embroidery on the hem, and there are glittering earrings hidden beneath a few loose, artfully curled locks. She does not look at him when she ascends to the altar, and he notices a line of sweat on the nape of her bare neck, her carefully coloured lips trembling ever so slightly. The air between them sparks, the words that are said glimmering between them like sunlight on a brook.

Blaise Zabini is his best man, and gives Draco an appreciative look when he catches sight of Astoria. Astoria's head bridesmaids wear their hair in long braids down their sari-draped backs, and bright glass bangles jangle on their arms as they hold out a ruby-studded band of gold on a plush cushion. The rings are slipped on, the vows said, and the kiss that follows is somewhat lessened by the sudden sight of a jet-haired young man and his friends seated on the front row, with a lightning shaped scar hidden by his unruly hair.

Lucius is excused from the party swiftly enough to avoid an all-out duel between him and Potter.

Astoria dances with him first (she tells him his bow-tie is crooked in the waltz and he accidentally treads on her gown in the slow dance), then her father and every single one of her brothers, and is scooped up by Zabini in a frantic Arabian song that is popular with the bride's side and scandalous to the groom's. Draco is accosted by several pale girl cousins he has never met, tries and fails to avoid his tearful mother, and is surprised when a pretty redheaded girl with freckles struts up to him in a golden dress and calls him 'Ferret' throughout the entire thing. It is only when Potter comes up to claim her that he realised it was Ginny, and some sort of painful guilt twists in his stomach when a young boy with a headful of Harry's hair races up and it is revealed that his name is James Sirius.

A bushy-haired, no longer buck-toothed woman he knows too well sidles up with her arm around Weasley, and shocks Draco into speechlessness when she invites him and Astoria round for dinner the next week.

He is so surprised the 'no' he coldly answers back is almost apologetic. They nod, accepting it, and before he can free his stunned tongue they have drifted off in a bubble of warmth and friendship and he is left standing alone. Lace-draped, golden-brown arms wrap around his waist, and Astoria dances with him until the sick feeling in his stomach fades. Her lips meet his again and this time he holds nothing back.

They tell him the night after their wedding was cold, but all Draco remembers is heat and soft, sweet sounds in the comforting dark.

He wakes just after her in the morning, and the light is bleak but welcome as it shines on Astoria's stirring bare form, visible just in the corner of his eye. They are curled up into each other in the silk sheets of his bed, quite still, and she tucks her knees into the back of his and tells him that she forgives him for trying to kill her family. With a spastic jerk he squirms round to look at her, properly, and the freckle low on her cheek folds into a very familiar dimple.

Years after, he will still kick himself for not recognising Astoria's cousins Padma and Parvati smirking at him when they held out the rings.


End file.
